“I bet you already know what my answer is, don’t you?”
Ethan smiled at Tara’s response to his question, gazing out lazily at the City they’d stormed through below. It looked so peaceful from up here – the Dreamstriders flapping about their repairs, the Obscaurus’ lithe necks twitching against the twilit sky – everything seemed totally at odds with the conversation they were having up here.
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned from living a boring mortal life in my own world,” Ethan replied, “it’s that I can’t know what anyone other than me is really thinking.”
Tara chuckled. “I’d settle for a boring life.”
“You? I doubt it. Not with the smooth moves I’ve seen from you.”
She smiled, and leaned against the window again, resting her head against the shimmering veil that protected them both from falling to their deaths.
“I don’t know, Ethan…I’ve watched my Sisters die already. I’ve seen the only people I’ve ever cared about run from me without a moment’s hesitation. I just – look – I don’t know if I can go through it again.”
“That’s…what you think of us?”
The Minxit turned, seeing Fauna’s smiling face mere inches from her own.
“Tara, you couldn’t get rid of us even if you tried.”
Before she could turn on ‘defense mode’ and tell the upstart bunny girl off, she found that Klax had appeared beside her.
“She’s right, you know,” the wolfman said. “We’re a team, Tara. We always have been.”
The catgirl looked from one of them to the other, seeing the sincerity in their faces.
“…Fuck,” she sighed to Ethan. “Let me guess, you had them hiding beside us listening in the whole time?”
“I might have been testing my Mass Hide skill a little,” Ethan winked.
“Might have fuckin’ known…”
She said these words not in anger, but in a kind of reserved sorrow. Turning back to her companions, it seemed, for once, that she didn’t know what to say.
And, for once, she didn’t have to say a thing: Fauna took her hand in hers and pressed it, before breaking into a soft song:
“Never gonna give you up. Never gonna let you down…”
And to the Minxit’s surprise, Klax’s hand was suddenly on theirs.
“Never gonna turn around and desert you,” the Lycae finished.
Ethan didn’t know whether to burst out laughing or cry. But, seeing the look that suddenly came over Tara’s face, he found that a smile was probably enough.
And so he added his gauntleted hand to the group.
“Let’s make a pact,” he told them with the grand City of lies as his witness. “That no matter what happens next, we’ll see this thing through to the end. We’ll win this world for all of hybrid kind, and we’ll walk on the surface again.”
They looked at him in a way he’d never had anyone look at him before, then. They looked at him like he was a real leader. And, for the first time in his Earthling and Argwylian life, he felt like one.
Tara wiped a pad of moisture from her eyes, before tightening her grip on the hands of her friends.
“Alright, alright!” she moaned. “Fuck. Couldn’t leave you guys alone for a second anyway. I mean – I am the sex appeal of the group. What would you do without me?”
Their laughter spilled out from the Nerve tower’s sphere like the endless undulations of the tower’s innards, radiating into the city itself and causing the ‘Striders that loomed below to stop for a brief moment and look towards the strange sounds of happiness they had never heard resonate within their starless domain.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
Then, when the sound finally died away, Ethan walked with his warriors to the fog-door at the end of the sphere.
“Alright,” he said. “I’ve got a plan for how we take down Mr Happy and his bitch-Queen. It’s gonna be messy, but it should work. Here’s what we’re gonna do…”
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“What happens when it’s over?”
It was a childish question – one he’d asked her before – but all the same he needed an answer.
He stood atop the debased body of the City’s Boss – MALAK, THE LORD OF DREAMS. He’d been a nuisance, teleporting his clown-like body around the Nerve Tower’s peak and using the spectral waterfalls that surrounded them like flowing curtains to conceal his form. But he’d perished. No Boss creature of a Grade C Delve was going to be able to stand against two Greycloaks in their prime.
“Do I need to repeat myself, Arty?” Carliah replied, wiping the creature’s viscous, sapphire blood off her broadsword. “We’ve been through this already.”
“I’m not a child anymore,” he answered. “I want to know if the years have tempered your ambition."
Around them, the sounds of rushing water assailed their ears. The rest of the arena was barren. Dream like. It was an expanse of blue-white cubes that dissembled and reassembled themselves continuously under their feet. Of course, it was nothing but another trick of the light – the whole arena was a single platform. The cubes patterns of movement existed just to sow fear in the Delver standing on top of them – make them think there was an environmental danger to consider here.
Maybe that’d been a problem for Delvers who came through here before, but for them? Malak hadn’t even made it to his second phase.
And now, they waited.
“You must know that Greycloaks control of this world won’t be accepted,” he told Carliah. “The monarchs of Argwyll won’t bow down simply because the Greys of Westerweald say so.”
She laughed aloud at his statement – a laugh that, by this point, was burned into his very soul.
“Oh, Arty – come on. We practically already own this world. You think the other commanders across Argwyll aren’t waiting for the chance to take this place? When I give the word, we’ll take the head from every fat-arsed monarch that still rules. We’ll topple every castle and live as Gods – like we deserve.”
He looked at her with stern trepidation.
“You would choose civil war, Carliah? You really think every Greycloak will back you?”
“Arty,” she replied tetchily. “Believe me, it won’t be much of a war.”
Their eyes met across the already blood-strewn battlefield that the Lightborn knew was to be his last. What he saw in her eyes inspired no hope for the future. And yet, he was here, now, and he had a job to do. His job.
What did it matter what the future brought? It was a future he’d never even see.
“You know something?” Carliah suddenly asked. “There is one thing I’d like to know before all this is over.”
He cocked an uncaring eyebrow at her.
“Why’d you do it?” she asked him. “Why’d you reject the sacrifice? When you plunged your sword into Gyko you were supposed to die. And yet, you didn’t. And nobody knows why, Arty. Like it or not, you did make history in your lifetime. Your failure showed us even the best could be brought low in the last moments before a victory.”
He felt his grip on his blade harden. He imagined…just for a moment…
“So, tell me why,” she said again. “Even just to sate my morbid curiosity. I’d imagine you’d like to get it off your chest before the end. Or even now are you hesitating to actually have your life mean something?”
Whatever reply he had for her was lost in the whirl of light that broke through the waterfall at the arena’s end.
And they saw him.
“Guess there’s just some things I’ll never know,” she told him as she stood, resplendent in her still pristine armor. “But I do know this: I lost two good men to this Delve today, Arty. They sacrificed themselves for you. Don’t let them die in vain.”
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When Ethan and his party emerged through the translucent veil of the Nerve Tower’s final floor, they were met with a sight that shouldn’t have surprised them at all.
The ghostly waterfalls cascading down from the sky around them was a nice touch, and the luminescent cubes that formed the arena floor were new, sure. But that wasn’t what was occupying his mind.
Ethan took in the corpse of the Delve Boss and its two slayers with a slight gulp.
He was just like he remembered him. Stuffy. Scarred. Old beyond all logic. Whatever magic Kaedmon placed on his Lightborn to keep him together was clearly starting to wear off. Still, he knew not to underestimate the speed and strength of those old bones.
The woman beside him though – blonde, broad shouldered, thick-hipped – carried herself like she was Queen of the entire world. She looked at the new arrivals, one hand on her hip, and openly scoffed.
“So, this is the last Archon,” she said. “And who does he bring as his entourage? A rabble of mangy animals.”
She unsheathed the blade at her side with an exaggerated swipe. Seemed like all these Greycloaks had a flair for the theatrical.
“Carliah Argent,” she declared, though no one asked. “Senior Commander of the Grey, Westerweald Chapter. And of course, you know my associate. He’s the man who’ll be taking the head from your shoulders.”
Artorious didn’t move a muscle. Ever since Ethan had entered the arena, he’d just sat and stared forward like a mute.
“We admire your attitude, Archon,” his Commander said. “Coming to us to die like this saves quite a bit of work on our end. Are you vain enough to bequeath any last words to us, demon?”
Ethan looked to his companions, each one of them having been ready for this battle ever since they’d first grabbed him from the Lightborn’s clutches.
“Shit,” he said. “And I thought he was uptight.”
A flash of air. The drawing of a blade. A distinct, piercing howl.
And then: pain.
Ethan looked down to see the rapier of the Lightborn lodged in his chest. The scarred face of his assailant was suddenly right in front of him.
And in the next second, he felt the tip of the blade slice into Valgraiva’s black heart.
“ETHAN!”